Jean Stapleton

Jean Stapleton, who has died aged 90, was among America’s best-known character
actresses, admired chiefly for her role as the ingenuous Edith, wife of the
blue-collar arch-bigot Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) in the 1970s
television sitcom All in the Family — the American version of Till Death Us
Do Part.

Jean Stapleton as Edith, with Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker, in All in the FamilyPhoto: ALLSTAR

6:22PM BST 03 Jun 2013

All in the Family, set in the New York borough of Queens, closely followed the format of its British progenitor (which starred Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett): right-wing working-class bigot, his long-suffering wife, their daughter married to a child of the counterculture.

Archie called Edith “Dingbat”, and, as the magazine Newsweek put it, saw himself as “menaced by a rising tide of spades, spics, spooks, fairies, fruits, fags [and] four-eyes” — all species who offended his conception of Middle America. Having to cope with this was his warm-hearted wife Edith, some of whose traits Jean Stapleton said she took “from a beloved aunt who is now deceased” .

First broadcast in January 1971, All in the Family became America’s top-rated show for five consecutive years, and at one stage was said to be watched by 60 million people. The series won a cascade of awards, and Jean Stapleton was nominated for eight Emmys, winning three (1971, 1972 and 1978) during her eight years on the show. It was screened in Britain by the BBC between 1971 and 1975.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1972, Jean Stapleton said: “What Edith represents is the housewife who is still in bondage to the male figure, very submissive and restricted to the home. She is very naive, and she kind of thinks through a mist, and she lacks the education to expand her world. I would hope that most housewives are not like that.”

She eventually left the show in 1980, fearing being typecast. It continued for another four years under the title Archie Bunker’s Place — with Archie carrying on as a widower.

Jean Stapleton was born Jeanne Murray on January 19 1923 in New York City, the daughter of an advertising salesman and his wife, a classical singer. After Wadleigh High School she took a secretarial course, but her heart was set on the stage. She attended acting classes, and from the mid-Forties worked with various theatre companies on the East Coast. Her break came in 1948, when she was cast in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Harvey, which went on a four-month tour. By 1953 she was on Broadway, winning good notices for her performance in In the Summer House. She went on to appear in the hit musicals Damn Yankees (1955) and The Bells Are Ringing (1956) — later reprising her roles in the screen versions of both.

Although she was cast in numerous television series — including Naked City, The Defenders and Dr Kildare — theatre was always Jean Stapleton’s principal interest, and she was a fixture on the American stage in the Fifties and Sixties. In 1961 she was in the Broadway production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros; and in 1964 she was the first Mrs Strakosh in Funny Girl, alongside Barbra Streisand.

After her success in All in the Family, Jean Stapleton gave a series of well-received performances off-Broadway, including in plays by John Osborne and Harold Pinter.

She also played Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1982 television film Eleanor, First Lady of the World. On the big screen she had parts in Klute (1971), starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland; You’ve Got Mail (1998), with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; and in Michael (1996), alongside John Travolta.

She might have repeated her success as a television star had she not turned down the offer to star in Murder, She Wrote, the long-running series about a female detective. The part went instead to Angela Lansbury.

Jean Stapleton’s husband, the director William Putch, whom she married in 1957, died of a heart attack in 1983 aged 60. They had a son and a daughter.